Mike Lancaster - 0.4

I realised that I was afraid. Not of the terrible thing that had been seconds away from destroying us, but afraid of my friend.

Of Danny.

Of what he had become.

He walked quickly, neither slowing down nor turning to check that we were keeping up with him. Or if we were even following him, for that matter.

The sky was almost full dark now, with a summer-stuffed moon looming on the horizon, surrounded by wisps of cloud and tiny, icy chips of starlight.

For centuries humankind had stared up into a sky like that and wondered whether they were alone in the universe.

Now I thought we had our answer.

A dark, tall shape loomed out of the darkness ahead and Danny led us towards it. Eventually the shape resolved itself out of the near dark, revealed itself to be an old, ramshackle barn on the edge of the field.

‘I guess here is as good as anywhere,’ Danny said.

He walked into the barn.

It was no longer Danny, I was certain of that. He was one of them . This could be a trap, an ambush, a massacre.

But he might really have answers.

Answers we needed.

We followed him into the barn.

Quietly.

Like cattle.

Or…

NOTE

The last break in the narrative as the end of the tape once more gets in the way. Howard Tillinghast sees this break as crucial. ‘This is the point at which innocence breathes its last gasp of oxygen, before revelation takes it away, forever.’

… last side of the last tape I can find. It’s one of Dad’s mix tapes that he makes for the car so he can embarrass us with his bizarre musical taste on long journeys.

Still, I guess we’re almost through now. There’s not a whole lot more to tell.

Only the bad stuff.

The stuff I don’t even want to think about.

This might get a little mixed up, but bear with me, I need to work out the best way to tell you the things I have to tell you.

I wonder if anyone’s listening.

If you are then I need you to believe me.

It’s the truth.

Inside the barn it was dark, and there was a musty stench in the air that made me gag. My shin crashed into something hard.

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ Danny said in the gloom. ‘How thoughtless of me.’

I heard him moving about and then…

… then it wasn’t dark any longer.

I heard Kate O’Donnell gasp.

Oh, I know how crazy this sounds. Do you know how many times I have run it through in my head and still end up doubting the evidence of my own senses?

An eerie halo of reddish light, bright enough to illuminate the barn around us, suddenly appeared, surrounding Danny.

He smiled.

‘Bioluminescence,’ he said, as if it were another of his conjuring tricks he was performing and he was particularly proud of it. ‘I knew I could do it, but… well… WOW!’

Danny looked at us and shrugged.

‘It’s a simple trick, really,’ he said. ‘Basically, I converted some skin cells to photoproteins.’ He spoke like that was not only normal, but something we should understand. ‘I’m fuelling them with some excess calcium that I’m growing from my own skeleton.’

He laughed. ‘It tickles, if anyone’s interested.’

NOTE – ‘Bioluminescence’

Although dramatically simplified, this is indeed the way that we produce light. One of the strengths of the Straker Tapes is, I believe, that they do show us the things we do normally and naturally in a new and different way, as if Kyle is really experiencing these commonplace sights for the first time, in the position of an outsider.

In Identity Crises: Bodies as Text, Steinmetz writes: ‘Things we take for granted are shown in a new light by Straker’s words. Filament networking and bioluminescence are so familiar to us that it takes a boy to remind us how precious these things are.’

We stood there open-mouthed, trying to work out if Danny was toying with us, or whether he’d really just used parts of his skeleton to light up the barn.

There was a long silence and then Lilly stepped towards Danny with a ferocious look on her face that was altered into something satanic by that strange red glow. Danny shook his head, and there was something about the way that he did it that made Lilly stop in her tracks.

Suddenly it wasn’t rage on her face.

It was fear.

One small shake of the head and that’s what Danny could do now: stop rage and turn it into fear.

What have you done to my friend? I thought, because this wasn’t him.

‘Please,’ Lilly said. ‘Please, Danny. Stop playing around with us. I’ve had enough. I’m tired and cold and scared and I want to go home. What happened today? Why has everyone… changed ? What are you?’

Danny looked on the verge of saying something. He had a dreadfully serious expression on his face and seemed to be having trouble finding the right words. Instead he looked around the barn and gestured towards a row of straw bales at the back of the barn.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Sit down.’

‘We don’t want to sit down,’ Mr Peterson said crossly. ‘We want to know what the hell is going on.’

‘THEN SIT!’ Danny said, his face suddenly looking cruel in the red light.

We sat.

‘I only have a few hours,’ Danny said. ‘This is a… caretaking routine for the master program that will end as soon as the installer quits.’ He paused and reflected on his words. ‘Actually, and more accurately, it’s a sub-routine, but that’s just splitting hairs.’

‘The master program,’ Lilly said. She turned to me. ‘That’s what you were talking about. A computer program that was the spaceships and ray guns all rolled into one. You were right .’

Danny laughed.

‘Was he?’ he said, amused by the idea. ‘Why, Kyle? What did you say?’

His gaze made me feel nervous.

‘I said that our planet was being invaded,’ I said. ‘That we were experiencing an alien invasion that doesn’t waste ships or troops, and doesn’t give us a chance to fight back.’

Danny raised an eyebrow.

‘Sounds fascinating,’ he said, his voice dripping with condescension. ‘Tell me more.’

I felt a sudden, red urge to punch him in the face.

Instead I carried on.

‘Whenever I try to get my head around all of this, I keep coming back to computers,’ I said. ‘I don’t know if it’s because we first saw the weird language on Kate’s Mac, but it made me realise that an invasion doesn’t have to be violent. Because an alien race could send a signal across space, a signal that contained a computer program designed to overwrite humanity and all the things that make us human. With one clever piece of software they could change us all, at once, into the image of themselves.

‘Maybe human DNA has been altered by this signal. And human brains are being reprogrammed to mimic the invaders’ brains.’

Danny grinned as if he were delighted by my words. He clapped his hands together and then rubbed them against each other.

‘Oh, how wonderful ,’ he said, again with the patronising tone, the superior air. He was almost daring me to continue.

‘We just happened to be in your trance when the signal was transmitted,’ I said. ‘A one-in-a-million chance. It meant our brains were in a different state, and the signal passed us over. Maybe our invaders had considered every possible human state – from awake to asleep and everything in between – but hadn’t considered hypnotised . Maybe there’s a tiny percentage of humanity that – for a variety of reasons – will be immune to this invasion by computer program . Us. The nought-point-four.’